Microsoft may be turning its back on copy and paste right now, but istartedsomething.com says that there just wasn't enough time to have it in place for launch

Microsoft's
decision not
include true multitasking or copy/paste on shipping version of
Windows Phone 7 Series have sparked quite a bit of discussion
around the internet in the past few days. The copy/paste drama has
been an especially thorny topic. On the one side, you have people
saying that it's a travesty considering that Apple, Palm, RIM, and
Google support the feature. On the other side, you have people saying
that it isn't a big deal and that copy/paste should be relegated to
the desktop/notebook realm.

In
fact, previous reports suggest that Microsoft agrees with the latter
group. Microsoft's Todd Brix says that copy/paste just
isn't a big deal to the general consumer. Brix said that the the
lack of copy/paste is a "conscious decision" and that
“smart linking” (clickable web address, phone numbers, email
address, etc.) is all that is needed for the majority of smartphone
users. Brix even says that copy/paste on a smartphone platform isn't
even needed for mobile Office applications.

Despite
Microsoft seemingly bold stance on the issue of copy/paste right now,
istartedsomething
reports
that it indeed will be coming some time after the release of Windows Phone 7
Series. Sources close to istartedsomething
report that the Windows Phone 7 Series team wanted to have the
feature included from the start, but launching the operating system
by the end of the 2010 wouldn't have been a possibility if too much
energy devoted to make it work properly.

It
took Apple two years to bring copy/paste to the iPhone platform --
hopefully, Microsoft won't take nearly that long to introduce the
feature.

The reason Android is fragmented is because Google has no control over updating non "with Google" phones which run custom version of Android.

Since every version of Windows Phone 7 Series will be running the same software (no custom UIs allowed), I don't think they'll be running into that problem.

And to be honest, basically writing a brand new OS (on top of Windows CE, to be 100% accurate) takes a lot of time and effort. Better to have a few things done well at launch than rush a product with tons of features that clearly wasn't ready for market.